Muslim Cultural Politics: Family Dynamics and Gender

Programme Director: Professor Annelies Moors

This research programme addresses the politics of culture in
Muslim societies, including such sensitive topics as family law
reform, women migrant domestic workers, and the body politics
of representation. Intersecting and interacting with other
forms of identification and political mobilization, such as
those based on nationality, ethnicity, and class. Both the
family and gender have been and still are crucial categories in
such contestations and hence central in the sub-programmes.
These all employ a similar approach. Starting with public
debates, they deal with the junctures and disjuncture between
these debates and the practical politics of everyday life. They
also investigate how these debates have been mass-mediated, and
the impact of particular forms and genres of mass-mediation on
the issues debated. This includes an investigation of the
processes of inclusion and exclusion that are at stake and an
analysis of how patterns of authority are reproduced, modified,
or transformed.

a. Debating Family Law and Everyday Life

This sub-programme focuses on debates on family law reform.
These debates indicate the political and cultural sensitivity
of family-related issues in large parts of the Muslim world.
ISIM has brought together an international group of scholars
which has engaged in comparative research on the history of
debates on family law (the participants involved, their
argumentative styles, and the media and forums used), and has
analysed the shifting relations between the state, religious
functionaries, human rights NGOs, women activists, and the
Islamists under conditions of globalization in the 1990s
(published as a special issue of Islamic Law and
Society in 2004). For the next five years the focus of
this sub-programme will shift to an investigation of how these
debates relate to legal practices and everyday life (a field in
which a number of Ph.D. students work), dealing with new and
controversial forms of marriage and divorce in the Middle East
and beyond. In 2003 a conference titled "What Happened":
Telling Stories about Law in Muslim Societies was held jointly
with CEDEJ in Cairo. Furthermore,this programme will continue
the research programme initiated by the former ISIM director,
Prof. Muhammad Khalid Masud, on thesocial construction of
sharia. In the course of the next three years, two topics will
beaddressed in collaboration with Prof. Léon Buskens and
colleagues abroad: the colonial construction of sharia and
Islamic law and customs.

This sub-programme intends to trace the transnational
migration patterns of women who are positioned differently with
respect to religion, ethnicity, and nationality in order to
analyse the relations between gendered family dynamics,
transnational migration, and the production of new identities.
Both the overt workings of "political religion" in public
debates about migrant domestic work and the much more covert
cultural-religious notions that are submerged in normative
ideas about the family, labour, and domesticity are addressed
as well as their impact on the intimate, personalized relations
between employers and domestics where the public and the
private merge. Moors was a founding partner in the
collaborative SSRC-funded project on "Migrant domestic workers:
becoming visible in the public sphere?" (working with
colleagues in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and the UAE); WOTRO has
funded one postdoctoral position on the cultural politics of
migrant domestic labour, starting in 2004.

c. The Body Politics of Representation: Fashion and
Gold

This sub-programme focuses on the body politics of
representation, departing from Muslim women's
appearance/embodied practices. Broadening the notion of the
public sphere to a moreall-encompassing "politics of presence"
itallows for theinclusion of other forms of critical expression
and non-verbal modes of communication, such as through bodily
comportment, appearance, and dressing styles, including
lifestyle and consumption. Both dressing styles and wearing
gold relate to particular forms of Muslim cultural politics,
albeit in different ways. Whereas debates about dress focus on
textual interpretations and practices need to be located in the
field of globalized fashion, access to gold is intimately
linked to Muslim institutions such as the dower and
inheritance. A major conference on Islam and fashion has been
organized at the University of Amsterdam in 2005.

2006, 'Representing Family Law Debates in Palestine : Gender
and the Politics of Presence', in Birgit Meyer and Annelies
Moors, eds., Media, Religion and the Public Sphere ,
Indiana University Press. Pp. 115-32.

2006, (with Birgit Meyer), 'Media, Religion and the Public
Sphere: Introduction', in Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors,
eds., Media, Religion and the Public Sphere . Indiana
University Press. Pp. 1-29.

2003, 'From "Women's Lib." to "Palestinian Women": The
Politics of PicturePostcards in Palestine/Israel', in David
Crouch and Nina Lubbren, eds., Visual Culture and
Tourism , Oxford and New York :Berg Publishers. Pp.
23-39.

2003, 'Public Debates onFamily Law Reform. Participants,
Positions, and Styles of Argumentation in the 1990s',
Islamic Law and Society 10, 1: 1-11.

1999, 'Debating Islamic Family Law: Legal Texts and Social
Practices', in Marlee Meriwether and Judith Tucker, eds.,
The Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle
East . Boulder : Westview Press. Pp. 141-177.

1990, 'Gender Hierarchy in a Palestinian Village : The Case
of Al-Balad.' In K. Glavanis and P. Glavanis, (Eds.), The
Rural Midd-le East : Peasant Lives and Modes of Production
. London : Zed Press. Pp. 195-210.

Conferences Organized

Workshop ' Negotiating in private, transforming the public:
The dynamics of migrant domestic labour in Asia and the Middle
East', ISIM/ASSR,9 september 2005 (with Marina de Regt).

Shifra Kish: Translating Deafness and/in a Bedouin Community in Israel. ASSR fellowship, with Anita Hardon, 2002-2006, defended University of Amsterdam, 17 December 2012.

Arzu Unal: Wardrobes of Turkish-Dutch Women. The Multiple Meanings and Aesthetics of Muslim Dress, defended University of Amsterdam, 5 July 2013.

Vanessa Vroon-Najem: Sisters in Islam. Women's conversion and the politics of belonging: A Dutch case study, 2011-2014, defended University of Amsterdam, 9 April 2014.

Willemijn Krebbikx, Making sex, moving difference: An ethnography of sexuality and diversity in Dutch schools, defended University of Amsterdam, 26 January 2018 (with Amade M'Charek and Rachel Spronk).

Moors, A. (2012). The affective power of the face veil: between disgust and fascination. In D. Houtman, & B. Meyer (Eds.), Things: religion and the question of materiality (pp. 282-295). New York: Fordham University Press. [details]

Moors, A., Jureidini, R., Özbay, F., & Sabban, R. (2008). Migrant domestic workers: a new public presence in the Middle East? In S. Shami (Ed.), Publics, politics and participation: locating the public sphere in the Middle East and North Africa (pp. 151-175). New York: Social Science Research Council. [details]

1999

Moors, A. C. A. E. (1999). "Debating Islamic Family Law: Legal Texts and Social Practices. In M. Meriwether, & J. Tucker (Eds.), The Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East (pp. 144-177) [details]

Moors, A. (2014). Face veiling in the Netherlands: public debates and women's narratives. In E. Brems (Ed.), The experiences of face veil wearers in Europe and the law (pp. 19-41). (Cambridge studies in law and society). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415591.003[details]

2013

Moors, A. (2013). Fashion and its discontents: the aesthetics of covering in the Netherlands. In E. Tarlo, & A. Moors (Eds.), Islamic fashion and anti-fashion: new perspectives from Europe and North America (pp. 241-259). London: Bloomsbury. [details]

Moors, A. (2013). Unregistered Islamic marriages: anxieties about sexuality and Islam in the Netherlands. In M. S. Berger (Ed.), Applying Shariʻa in the West: facts, fears and the future of Islamic rules on family relations in the West (pp. 141-164). (Debates on Islam and society). Leiden: Leiden University Press. [details]

2002

1999

Moors, A. C. A. E. (1999). Debating Islamic Family Law: Legal Texts and Social Practices. In J. Tucker, & M. Meriwether (Eds.), The Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East (pp. 141-177). Boulder: Westview Press. [details]

Moors, A. C. A. E. (invited speaker) (17-8-2011). Islamic fashion, at Public Research Seminar ‘Media and religion in cultural context: Scholarly and Research Perspectives’, Hyderabad, University of Hyderabad.

Moors, A. C. A. E. (invited speaker) (21-6-2011). Informal Islamic marriages in the Netherlands and beyond, Conference Applying Sharia in the West: Facts, Fears and the Future of Islamic Rules on Family Relations in the West, Leiden, Leiden University.

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